More recent additions to the econ blogosphere:

Cheap Talk: By an anonymous econ grad student who likes industrial organisation, travelling and reading nonfiction.

sustainable options: By Martin de Wit, from South Africa, a blog about natural resources, the environment and sustainable development in Africa.

economic woman: Where economics and feminism collide, by an undergraduate in economics and international relations at the University of Toronto in Canada.

The Yellow Brick Road: An investment and finance blog on the Wall Street Examiner site.

More evidence that poverty doesn’t stop innovation: The extremely cool blog AfriGadget, about how people with limited resources solve everyday problems with large amounts of ingenuity. Constrained optimisation at its finest!

For example, check out this home-made helicopter:

(HT: Signal vs Noise)

Check out this article in BusinessWeek about Twitter. The article itself is pretty ordinary, but look at the spectacular number of hyperlinks it contains. In fact, there are so many links that the article is hard to read and I gave up.

I was wondering why having too many links in an article can be bad. I think it’s because when you encounter a link during reading, you have to think a little. What is this link about? Should I click it? Too many links makes for too much of this type of thinking, which makes reading the article hard. Also, the blue colour and underline of links is distracting. With so many distractions from the links, I couldn’t concentrate on what the BW writer was trying to say.

I wonder what the optimal ratio of links to words is. By my count, the BW article contains about 1,200 words and 42 links. My gut feeling says that one link per 100 words is about the maximum you’d want to have for a regular article.

(HT: Web 2.0…Really?)

Google spreadsheets has added forms, which allow web users to input data into a spreadsheet that you’ve created. This makes it perfect for running simple surveys. Here’s a quick run-down on how to do it:

First go to Google Docs and create an account if you haven’t already got one. Then make a new blank spreadsheet.

Next, share the spreadsheet by clicking the share button at the top right corner:

You’ll be prompted to name the spreadsheet, and then you get some sharing options. Choose the forms option, then click “Start editing your form”:

Then you’re presented with a form editor which is pretty self explanatory. You can enter a title for the survey, some explanatory text, and then questions which can be short or long text input, multiple choice (with an “other” option), checkboxes, or selection from a list. You can add, edit, delete and re-order questions easily.

When you’re done with the questions, click “Next, choose recipients”. Then you’re presented with various options for giving the survey to people. You can email it to specific people by entering email addresses, and if you like you can embed the form in the actual email (if the recipients can handle html email). Alternatively you can click the “Embed” link at the top right to embed the form in any kind of web page. Just copy and paste the code that’s provided into your web page.

And that’s all there is to it. Columns corresponding to the questions will be automatically created in your spreadsheet, and any data that people enter will appear in the right place, with a timestamp. One thing lacking is data validation, so you can’t check at the input stage to make sure that people have entered appropriate responses, and you can’t have mandatory questions. It also lacks conditional branching questions, so all respondents will get to answer all questions. Despite these limitations, Google Spreadsheets are a very quick and convenient way to run a simple survey or other data collection exercise.

To keep track of new data, you can periodically check the spreadsheet, or you can add this gadget to your iGoogle homepage, which will automatically inform you when there are new entries:

Another example of technically sophisticated consumers undermining product differentiation strategies: The CHDK project, which is a piece of software that enables all sorts of advanced features on standard Canon point-and-shoot digital cameras.

Firms commonly re-use components between high-end and low-end products to save money and disable some of the features in the low-end models. In this case, Canon uses the same DIGIC image-processing chips in many kinds of its cameras. The CHDK software helps you to turn on the disabled features, as well as adding a scripting programming language that can be used to do all sorts of cool things like time-lapse photography.

I expect to see more and more of these cases, as consumers enabled by the Internet become increasingly sophisticated. Firms may have to rethink how they implement product differentiation.

(Via Lifehacker)